Cannes 2025: What the Winners Reveal About Modern Marketing

Cannes Lions 2025 produced the usual spectacle: standing ovations, acceptance speeches, and a week’s worth of industry commentary about creativity saving the world. Strip that away and the winning work tells a more interesting story, one about where serious marketing budgets are actually going and why the gap between what gets awarded and what gets approved in most boardrooms is still uncomfortably wide.

This is not a roundup of the best ads. It is an honest read of what Cannes 2025 signals for go-to-market thinking, brand investment, and the commercial logic that sits behind the creative choices most marketers will never get the budget to make.

What Cannes 2025 Was Really Rewarding

I have spent enough time around award juries to know that the stated criteria and the actual criteria are not always the same thing. When I judged the Effie Awards, the room would often start with a rigorous discussion about measurable effectiveness and, over hours of deliberation, drift toward work that felt important. Cannes is more susceptible to that drift than most. The Lions are awarded for creative excellence, which is legitimate, but the industry has a habit of reverse-engineering business cases around the work after the fact.

That said, 2025 was a more commercially coherent year than many. The Grand Prix conversations were dominated by work that had genuine strategic ambition behind it, not just production craft. The brands that won at the top level had made deliberate choices about audience, timing, and cultural context. They were not just making beautiful things. They were making things that changed how a category of people thought about a brand.

That distinction matters. Changing brand perception at scale is the hardest thing in marketing and also the most commercially valuable. It is what Forrester’s intelligent growth model has long argued separates sustainable market leaders from brands that grow through acquisition and discounting cycles. The Cannes winners who understood this were the ones worth paying attention to.

The Upper Funnel Is Back, and It Never Really Left

Earlier in my career I was guilty of overvaluing lower-funnel performance. I managed large paid search budgets and watched the numbers respond in ways that felt satisfying and provable. What I did not fully appreciate at the time was how much of that conversion activity was demand that already existed. The brand had already done the work. The search campaign was collecting the harvest.

Cannes 2025 made this argument visually. The work that won the biggest prizes was overwhelmingly upper-funnel in intent. It was designed to reach people who were not yet thinking about the category, to plant a thought, to create a feeling, to make a brand feel like something worth considering when the moment eventually arrived. That is not a soft argument. That is how market share actually moves over time.

Think about how a physical retail environment works. Someone who picks up a garment and tries it on is dramatically more likely to buy than someone who walks past the rail. The brand work that won at Cannes was doing the equivalent of getting people to pick things up: creating the conditions for consideration before the purchase moment exists. Performance marketing, at its best, is waiting at the till. Both matter, but most marketing budgets have been weighted so heavily toward the till that the shop floor is understaffed.

If you want to think more rigorously about where brand investment fits inside a growth strategy, the frameworks in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub are worth working through. The relationship between brand and performance is one of the most consistently misunderstood areas in modern marketing planning.

AI Creative: What the Winning Work Actually Did

There was significant noise around AI-generated and AI-assisted creative at Cannes 2025. Some of it was warranted. Some of it was the industry doing what it does, which is attaching itself to whatever technology is generating the most conference panel bookings.

The awarded AI work had something in common: the AI was not the idea. In every case that held up under scrutiny, there was a clear strategic thought at the centre, a human insight, a genuine tension, a cultural observation. The AI was used to execute that thought at a scale or speed or personalisation level that would not have been possible otherwise. That is a legitimate and commercially interesting use of the technology.

What did not win, and what should not win, is work where the novelty of the technology substitutes for the absence of an idea. I have sat in too many agency briefings where the technology was proposed before the problem was properly defined. The question “what can we do with AI?” is a much weaker starting point than “what does this audience need to believe, and how do we get there?” The Cannes jury, to its credit, seemed to understand this distinction.

For marketers thinking about how to integrate AI into their creative process, the honest answer from Cannes 2025 is: use it to do more with a strong idea, not to generate the idea itself. That sounds obvious. It is apparently not, given the volume of AI-forward submissions that did not place.

Creators Are Now a Strategic Channel, Not a Tactical Add-On

One of the clearest signals from Cannes 2025 was the mainstreaming of creator-led work across multiple categories. This was not influencer marketing in the 2018 sense, which was largely about borrowed reach and product placement. The awarded work used creators as genuine creative partners, people who brought an audience relationship, a tone, and a point of view that the brand could not manufacture internally.

This reflects something that has been happening in media budgets for several years. The line between brand and performance spending is blurring because creator content can do both simultaneously. A well-constructed creator partnership can build brand association and drive measurable action in the same piece of content. Later’s research on creator-led go-to-market campaigns has documented this convergence in practical terms, and the Cannes winners brought it to life at scale.

The strategic implication for most brands is not “we need to find a creator.” It is “we need to think about what kind of cultural relationship we are trying to build, and whether a creator can be a more credible vehicle for that than our own brand voice.” Those are different questions, and the second one is harder and more useful.

I have run agencies where we pitched creator strategies to clients who wanted to control every word of every post. That tension is real and understandable. Brand safety matters. But the brands that won at Cannes this year had found a way to give creative partners enough room to be genuine. The work felt like it came from a person, not a brand pretending to be a person. That is a meaningful difference to an audience that has become very good at detecting the latter.

The Market Penetration Argument Hidden in the Grand Prix Work

If you look at the Grand Prix winners through a growth strategy lens rather than a creative lens, a consistent pattern emerges. The work was almost universally oriented toward reaching people outside the existing customer base. Not retargeting. Not loyalty. Not category buyers who were already aware. New people, new contexts, new mental availability.

This is the market penetration argument that Semrush’s analysis of market penetration strategy outlines clearly: growing your share of a market means reaching more of the people in that market, not just selling more to the ones you already have. The brands that win over time are the ones that build the widest possible base of people who have a positive feeling about them before they are ready to buy.

This is not a new idea. Byron Sharp has been making this argument for years. What Cannes 2025 showed is that the most commercially ambitious brands are now building this logic into their creative briefs, not just their media plans. The work is designed to be seen by people who are not yet customers, to mean something to them, and to make the brand feel like a natural choice when the category eventually becomes relevant.

Most marketing budgets are not built this way. Most are built around existing customers, existing intent, existing search behaviour. That is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The Cannes winners are a reminder of what the rest of the funnel can do when it is taken seriously.

What Cannes Gets Wrong, and Why It Matters

I want to be honest about the limitations here, because Cannes has real ones and the industry does not always acknowledge them clearly.

The first is selection bias. The work that gets submitted to Cannes is not a representative sample of the marketing industry. It is the work that agencies and brands believe will win awards, which is a specific subset of all the work being done. The vast majority of effective marketing, the campaigns that quietly moved market share or held a price point or launched a product into a competitive category, never gets submitted because it does not look like award-winning work.

The second is budget bias. The Grand Prix winners are almost always produced by brands with significant resources. The production values, the media investment, the cultural partnerships, these things cost money. A mid-size brand with a sensible marketing budget cannot simply replicate what Heinz or Dove or whoever won the Film Grand Prix did. The strategic logic is transferable. The execution often is not.

The third is the effectiveness gap. Cannes does not primarily award effectiveness. The Effie Awards do that, and the overlap between Effie winners and Cannes winners is meaningful but not complete. Some of the most celebrated Cannes work over the years has not moved the commercial needle in any measurable way. Some of the most effective marketing ever produced would never get past the first round of Lions judging because it is not interesting to look at.

None of this means Cannes is worthless as a signal. It means you should read it as one input among several, not as a blueprint.

The Strategic Lessons That Transfer to Any Budget

When I was handed the whiteboard pen at Cybercom during a Guinness brainstorm, with the founder walking out the door to a client meeting and the room looking at me, my instinct was to reach for something safe. I did not. I put something on the board that felt true to the brand and true to the audience, even if it was uncomfortable to say out loud. That is the discipline the best Cannes work demonstrates, not bravery for its own sake, but the willingness to say something specific and real rather than something vague and acceptable.

The strategic lessons from Cannes 2025 that apply regardless of budget are these.

First, be clear about who you are trying to reach and whether they are already in the market. If your entire media plan is built around capturing existing intent, you are not building a brand, you are harvesting one. At some point the harvest runs out.

Second, the idea has to come before the channel. The Cannes winners did not start with “we should do something on TikTok.” They started with a genuine human insight and then found the best way to express it. Channel selection is a downstream decision, not an upstream one.

Third, cultural credibility is earned, not bought. The brands that won this year had done the work of understanding their audience’s world. They were not parachuting into a conversation. They were part of one. That takes time and consistency, not just budget.

Fourth, measurement should inform creative ambition, not constrain it. The brands that consistently win at Cannes and at the Effies have found a way to hold both rigour and creative risk simultaneously. They measure what they can and make honest approximations about what they cannot. They do not refuse to invest in something because it is hard to attribute. Forrester’s work on go-to-market struggles has documented how measurement anxiety can paralyse otherwise capable marketing teams, particularly in complex categories.

If you are building a go-to-market strategy and want to stress-test how brand investment fits alongside your performance channels, the Growth Strategy hub has frameworks that are grounded in commercial reality rather than award-show logic.

The Bigger Question Cannes Raises Every Year

The conversation that happens in the background at Cannes, in the smaller sessions and the dinners and the conversations that do not make it onto the main stage, is always some version of the same question: is the industry making itself feel important at the expense of making clients’ businesses grow?

It is a fair question. The marketing industry has a tendency to celebrate its own craft in ways that can become disconnected from commercial outcomes. I have run agencies. I have sat in rooms where the creative work was genuinely brilliant and the client’s business was not moving. Those are uncomfortable conversations to have, and the industry does not always have them clearly enough.

Cannes 2025 was better than average on this front. The effectiveness conversation has become more central to the Lions than it was a decade ago. The Creative Effectiveness category has real weight now. But the tension is still there, and any marketer who takes Cannes seriously should hold that tension consciously rather than resolving it too quickly in either direction.

The work that wins at Cannes and drives business growth is not a coincidence. It is the product of organisations that have figured out how to hold creative ambition and commercial accountability in the same room without one killing the other. That is genuinely hard. It is also, based on the evidence, genuinely worth it. BCG’s research on go-to-market strategy consistently shows that companies with strong brand positioning alongside performance capability outperform those that have optimised for one at the expense of the other.

The tools available for growth-oriented marketers have never been better. The strategic clarity required to use them well has not changed. Cannes 2025, at its best, showed what that clarity looks like when it is expressed at scale. The job for everyone else is to find the version of that which works for their brief, their budget, and their business.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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